Meg’s team can complain all they want about the the mega-promotional (see: all red) Allred; the timing; the media show (and I do love the Reuters shot for this); and the employment of

celebrity site TMZ to guarantee the imagery from yesterday’s press conference would be immediately vacuumed into the annals of scandal iconography, there is nothing they can do about the political toxicity of that face, those eyes and those tears, especially beyond the gated communities.

(caption: Nicky Diaz, former housekeeper for California GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, listens as attorney Gloria Allred talks to reporters in Los Angeles Wednesday, Sept. 29, 2010. Diaz alleges that Whitman was notified seven years ago that the worker might be in the country illegally, but did nothing about it.)